Ones to talk

Time to descend into partisanship for a sec...

A bunch of Democrats forced the Senate into a closed session to discuss the alleged intelligence failure that supposedly led us to war with Baathist Iraq. I wonder how many of them voted for the war... or supported our lobbing of Tomahawk cruise missiles into Iraq throughout the '90s... anyway...

The only intelligence failure was the (Democrat led) gutting and ignoring of American HUMINT (inteligence derived from feet-on-ground in the target area) in the '90s and the failure to predict where and when many of the WMD were going to move. Other than that, our intel did about as well as usual. Truth be told, covert intel didn't need to play a huge part in reasons to go to war: Saddam Hussein has been a sore on the face of this earth pretty much since he was 12.
The Baathists were supplying anyone who had money with weapons (read Al-Qaeda).
Saddam was hard at work developing a nuclear weapons program after the setsbacks he suffered at that hands of the Israelis in the early '80s and a multinational coalition led by the U.S. in the eraly '90s... oh, by the way, using funding meant for humanitarian aid...
Last but not least, we saw him use chemical/biological weapons on several occasions, listened to his threats to use such weapons on us should we invade, and people were showing up in Iraq to buy such weapons.

I guess you could say that the 'failure' was not something that caused us to go to war, but that delayed our success (many of the wapons we were after have been moved... but we did nail the factories) so why the federal case?

I think it has to to do with an odd definition of peace from those on the left. It seems to me that they define peace by the absence of war and only by the absence of war. This overlooks the ugly fact that a war is simply open hostilities between governments and that a tyrannical and/or terrorist regime tends to inflict more damage to people with its sphere of influence than any war. Without open war, it is easy to ignore such ugliness. I think that the reason that the left is trying so hard to stop this war is that they can't stand to see what exactly they have been ignoring for so long. We all long for peace, but just because we are not at war with somebody does not mean that we are at peace. The war in Iraq is only the most visible part of a war that has been waged upon us for over 30 years... Whether anybody likes this or not, we are at war. "Open war is upon you whether you would risk it or not."

Peace is not achieved by not fighting, nor is it achieved by negotiation (negotiation only works on people who's motive is something other than your destruction... also check out what 12 years of negotiation did in Iraq: jack.). Peace can only be achieved by struggle, by fighting and destroying those who would breach peace.

So, if this tactic by the Senate Democrats is an effort to bring about peace, it's pretty wide of the mark and won't work: we could impeach every last Republican and leave Iraq tomorrow and it would solve nothing. If it's a procedural charge that inteligence assets were mishandled, they need look only to themselves and what they have done to both the CIA and the military. This war was inevitable. Only the time and place were on the table. People in general should consider accepting this and get on with life. If anyone is to know peace, there are some groups of people that have to go. The Baathists were one of them.